[Vision2020] FW: Garrison Keillor's Two Cents

[Donovan Arnold]

>
>/Written by one of the funniest and most kind orators in the media (NPR-- 
>the radio station for smart people), Garrison Keillor. If you don't know 
>who this is, getting to know him via this e-mail will perhaps shake your 
>brain into the reality that this country is truly in trouble. /
>
>By Garrison Keillor
>
>August 26, 2004
>
>Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it 
>was
>the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles
>who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and
>supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were
>good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, 
>the
>paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the
>antipapist antiforeigner element.
>
>The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who
>made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean
>War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to
>rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace
>and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and
>higher education burgeoned - and there was a degree of plain decency in the
>country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon
>was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the
>poor.
>
>In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward
>down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public
>service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the
>Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and
>fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
>flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in
>World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon
>moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry
>white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is
>another term for date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the
>GOP. "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the
>size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." 
>The
>boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
>
>The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of
>hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists,
>fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
>racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
>nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons,
>hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who
>believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little
>honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their
>Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow 
>of
>information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of
>badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the
>rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.
>
>Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine
>crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on 
>a
>massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation
>to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat 
>turds
>in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and
>behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great 
>wealth
>as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
>
>Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of
>tragedy - the single greatest failure of national defense in our history,
>the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a
>tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep
>secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to
>generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon 
>of
>debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war
>against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal
>satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen
>misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous
>transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the
>deception is working beautifully.
>
>The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death
>knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived
>this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours.
>The omens are not good.
>
>Our beloved land has been fogged with fear - fear, the greatest political
>strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered
>warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition.
>And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip
>the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, 
>bring
>public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax
>breaks on the rich.
>
>There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida
>recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming
>back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our
>history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And
>patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man
>who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
>
>Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting
>off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th 
>floor,
>the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W.
>Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic 
>uptick,
>maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to 
>get
>some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
>
>This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
>embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
>communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads.
>They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen
>in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and
>they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
>
>The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by
>Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln
>spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to
>death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag
>burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their
>sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and
>mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
>takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
>
>This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a
>sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than 
>however
>we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.
>
>Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time
>of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear
>reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life
>than winning.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in
>its 25th year on the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's new book,
>Homegrown Democrat (c 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a
>member of Penguin

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